


A Road To Somewhere

by Clarice Chiara Sorcha (claricechiarasorcha)



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Implied Relationships, M/M, Sibling Incest, post-age of ultron
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2015-05-08
Packaged: 2018-03-29 14:18:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3899449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claricechiarasorcha/pseuds/Clarice%20Chiara%20Sorcha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“We had not spoken in some time.” Thor’s words came to her as if through a filter of raincloud and rising wind. “He had been imprisoned for his crimes, and I off-world attending to matters that might have arisen from those actions.” He paused, and did not look to her. Instead he gazed away, and to a jury beyond mortal justice. “I regret that now.”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>Wanda kept her silence. She could not regret time not spent with Pietro. She had always been with Pietro.</i>
</p>
<p>Grief comes to each of us in different ways. Some things, though: they stay always the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Road To Somewhere

“I wished to thank you.”

Staring up at him hurt. Silhouetted by the sun, he should have been nothing but indistinct shape and sound. But no mortal man would tower over her in this way. And no mortal man had a mind that sparked and flared like stormclouds streaking across a wind-bruised sky.

His brow furrowed. “I am sorry. Am I disturbing you?”

She shifted, just a little. “I…no. Not really.” Thinning her lips, she wondered if she’d even managed to say it in English. As Thor came closer, taking a place beside her upon the stone bench, she saw his forehead held deep creases.

“I do not speak the common tongue of my comrades,” he said, sudden. Something kind shimmered in those silver-blue eyes, as quick and mercurial as had been her brother. She was already looking away by the time he spoke again.

“If you wish to speak your native tongue, please, feel free. I will understand you.”

The easy flowing switch to the language of her thoughts, of the talks taken with Pietro in her mind, did not come without suspicion. “You are not joking?”

“Not at all,” he replied, and she raised one eyebrow even as he smiled. “The Alltongue allows the realms to communicate with ease.” The grin grew broader yet. “Any misunderstanding or mistranslation is therefore entirely upon the heads of those who speak the way they do, and not due to the vagrancies of language.”

Wanda’s own expression remained neutral. “Is it really that simple?”

The faintest flitter of guilt crossed her mind to see the cheerfulness fade from his broad features. “Perhaps not. It is what I was taught, but then that is not necessarily the same as what we later learn.”

With a blink, Wanda turned to where her hands had wound about one another in her lap. Such thoughts, spoken aloud, were not entirely what she might have expected of him. But then, she had oh-so-briefly seen into his direct thoughts in South Africa. It had not been far, and certainly not deep: in battle, there was hardly the time for such, and his mind had been an odd place to navigate for one so untutored. It had not been human, of course. But even taking his alien species into account, Wanda had but rarely encountered warded minds, and never one in this particular way. Only the oddity of her own sceptre-induced powers had pushed through the barriers, or so she assumed. In the end she had never really had the time to consider it.

He took her silence as a rebuke. Already his great body tensed as if about to rise; even without his armour he appeared a warrior but a moment from battle.

“Truly, I do not wish to disturb you if you have come here seeking privacy. I will go, if you wish it.”

Rolling her tongue between her teeth, Wanda furrowed her brow. Then she tilted her head, eyes wary as a stray kitten offered a kind hand. “You came to speak with me?”

“If you will allow it.”

Her only reply was a curt nod. Thor kept his seat. Wanda found she still had to stare upward at him, even in this position. In what seemed every way he proved himself the closest to a god amongst them. She shivered to remember again that faintest brush over that peculiar mind. Only the Vision’s had been stranger, and she had recognised something of his mind in her own.

“I might not be talkative,” she said, sudden. Thor nodded, large hands resting upon the broad muscles of his thighs.

“We could do this another time, if that would please you better. I simply…” When he looked to her now, his expression wavered somewhere between uncertain and hopeful. “…I thought it would be better. Should we be alone.”

Wanda quirked an eyebrow, quite unable to help herself. “ _Alone_?”

Undeterred, he passed a wide palm back through his loosed hair, gave her a lopsided grin. “Yes.” It faded as quickly as it had come. “I thought I might…that we had something in common.”

“You are a god from beyond the Earth. I am an orphan in all senses of the word. What could we possibly have in common?”

Though she hadn’t quite intended the words to be as cold as they were, the ice of them seemed to roll off his back as if water. The faraway look he wore had taken him what felt a great distance from her side. “You knew of the Avengers, during the attack upon New York City?”

“Who didn’t?” This time she did not bother to mask her disgust. “Sokovia has troubles enough of its own, but who would care for the civil wars of eastern Europe when the Americans had aliens on Broadway?”

Thoughtful, now, Thor’s tone was an apology he did not need to give. “Do you wish to go home?”

Her throat tightened. The ruins of the city lay either in broken circle about the central crater, or pulverised to the dust which now choked the Black Sea. After the battle, she had not lingered long in the ruins of her childhood. The cemetery at least lay beyond the dark forest, and there she had buried Pietro beside what little of their parents had been recovered. Falling masonry was not kind to human bodies. But still it had been kinder than Stark’s thermobaric weaponry.

She spoke in English, this time. “I am in America now. I will do what I can to atone for the mistakes we made.”

That thoughtful look again; it burned with the scent of ozone. Wanda looked away before he spoke again. “My brother led the charge upon the city.”

“We heard that in Sokovia, too.” One of her silver rings held an emerald: fake, of course. It still flashed in the sun as she twisted it in restless back and forth. He had been draped in green, or so she remembered. The images had reached even them: a mad dog put down, led away in chains.

“My brother is dead.”

The jolt of it hit her with the force of lightning strike. There they remained, burned through her skin, blazing in her veins: words she herself could not speak aloud. The thunderous truth of them might shake her all to pieces if she did.

But she turned to him, expression set and still. “That, we did not hear.”

His nod was tight, almost militaristic in its stuttering brevity. “Few have. It happened off-realm – not on Asgard, even. Svartálfaheimr. The burned-out land of the dead dark elves.”

His words held the consistency of a fairytale. Something twisted low in her stomach, though it was her mind that filled with vague memory of dark cold rooms during endless rounds of power cuts and air raid sirens. Their mother’s voice had somehow remained sweet and soft in the darkness. Their father’s hands, gentle and large over the ragged but well-tuned banjo, had produced music enough to still even Pietro’s restless soul. Still, many a time had she kicked him in the night, he wriggled so much in his sleep. But it kept her warm. He had always been so _warm_.

“We had not spoken in some time.” Thor’s words came to her as if through a filter of raincloud and rising wind. “He had been imprisoned for his crimes, and I off-world attending to matters that might have arisen from those actions.” He paused, and did not look to her. Instead he gazed away, and to a jury beyond mortal justice. “I regret that now.”

Wanda kept her silence. She could not regret time not spent with Pietro. She had always been with Pietro.

“But the darkening times brought our worlds into eclipse.” His voice, already a rolling brontide, took on greater strength. “The nine realms converged, and so Loki and I too met again. As perhaps we had always been destined to meet first, and again, and always.”

Staring at him, Wanda could not speak. To do so would be to press futile human hands against a force of nature itself. Thor spoke instead to the sky, and one did not need her power to see the silver-gold aurora that danced upon his skin.

“He was my brother in bond, not blood. Adopted as an infant, though for so long we never knew better.” His head turned, pupils dark and wide. “That knowledge destroyed him.”

At first she felt only the fear of a small animal cornered by a ravenous wolf. Then all she fought was the urge to ask why he laid this at her door, near-stranger that she was. The time she had spent in this Asgardian’s mind, drawing out his deepest fears, had granted her only the faintest glimpse of his brother’s madness. In truth Thor had been captivated more by the promise of end of all things, and the weight upon his shoulders as one who might have taken a hand in its beginning.

“In those last mad minutes, he was my brother again. Utterly. Completely.” When he smiled now, it shimmered like the tears gathered at the back of his brilliant eyes. “And then he died just so I might live.”

Her own tears congealed as a thick hard ball in her throat. The archer, Barton, had spoken to her of Pietro’s sacrifice. She saw no reason to doubt the story. That had been her brother: always thinking himself so quick, so smart. He’d already lived life at breakneck speed; Hydra had then accelerated him almost beyond belief. But even those so enhanced might never outrun death.

She spoke slow, very steady. “I am sorry for your loss.”

“I worry for you in yours.” One hand twitched upon his knee, as if he thought better of reaching out to a near-stranger. “Before my brother’s death, I lost my mother, too. We set fire to her longboat but days before he left me, too.” He paused; when he spoke again, she scarcely realised the hollow sound as his voice. “Before I left him.”

The scent of the earth had been strong, that morning; it had rained all the night before, the sun only thinking to come out after the grave had been dug. There had been brief words, but no prayers. Wanda knew several; she had dutifully memorised them as a child. Her mother had been much the same in her own practice – in fact she might never have been leaned of them, had others not used those beliefs to strike down so many of her family. Marya Maximoff learned the Torah because she lived, and in turn her children had done the same.

But Wanda had kept those words to herself, the wildflowers in her hands scattering as her hands clenched to fists. The distant scream of a fox had not moved her. Not even the flutter of raven wings could have stopped her from staring at the motionless mound of earth that now held her brother still.

“But my father lives. And my friends.” Thor cleared his throat with clear difficulty. “I fear he was everything, to you.”

“And what if he was?”

He was not a man of silences, she supposed. But he did not speak, only watched her with a thoughtfulness that could not be called pity. That was good. She might have strangled him with strands of scarlet fury if he pitied her.

At last, he spoke. “I do understand.”

She snorted, eyes upon the only cloud in the sky. “How could you?”

One hand reached between them, the palm slightly cupped, but empty. “Would you see for yourself?”

At first she stared only at the offered hand, eyes tracing over and over the lines of life and love etched into the callused skin. When she glanced up, uncertainty unmasked, she found that he really did have _such_ blue eyes. Yet so easy they turned to silver, in the right light. Stormlight. Storm _bright_.

Pursing her lips, Wanda laid her palm on his. A second later, she snatched it back, breath wheezing from her lungs, heart aching, entire body trembling as if about to fall apart at every seam.

“I…” She clenched her hands tight, pressed the fists to her temples; still the images flashed through her mind like a slideshow gone mad. “What did you _do_?”

Though he smiled, it was tremulous, on the verge of collapse. “What we both desired.” Again, Thor made a motion as if to reach out for her, then pulled back. “But then, I did not need say so.” When he bowed his head, it could not stop the force of huskily voiced words. “You know yourself how it feels.”

The agony of it wound about her heart like razor wire; she could feel the blood spilling through her chest, drowning her lungs of air and breath. Wrapping her arms about herself, she drew a keening breath, but she had already lost everything she sought now to hold close to herself. His own sorrow matched hers beat for agonising beat; curling in upon herself, she ached to scream at the unfairness of his exposing her to his pain, when hers was a beast barely contained within her scarlet mind.

His arms came tight about her. For a moment, she physically could not catch a single breath. Then, with the scale and relentless force of a supernova, the sobs tore from her chest and loosed themselves screaming to the skies. Not even for Pietro could she have done it. Not even in her brother’s embrace could she have dashed her soul to so many pieces and watched them all burn.

But that was simply because only Pietro’s absence could make her feel this way.

Yet even with eyes clenched closed, she could see him there, lips curled around a half-smile and those constant tics of personality: the jiggling foot, the tapping fingers, the watchful eyes. He’d always stood so close to her even when she could feel him vibrating, aching to move. Words so often came too quick, but then she knew the rapid thoughts behind them. There had been no need for psychic powers when she could read his thoughts as though they were her own.

“There is much we do not have in common.” The massive arms were gentle about her, the way a lion could cradle a cub in jaws it used to dismember its prey. And he sighed, words soft as summer rain. “You were correct when you said so earlier. But…this sorrow, it will not leave you. But it _will_ lighten, in time.” His beard dragged soft over the crown of her head, the warmth of him the welcome heat of a blazing fireplace. “Let me take some of this heaviness from you, if only for a moment.”

Wanda cried to silence and for not one moment of it would she allow herself to feel guilt or shame. Only when it ended did she sit up, drawing away, face set as stone. Thor said not a word, but when he extended a hand to her, it was not empty. With a slight frown she took the small plastic packet. Perhaps carrying Kleenex brand tissues should be thought odd ,for a Norse god, but Wanda did not question it. He was no fool.

And neither was she.

The crying fit had destroyed her makeup. Without care she set about removing every last inch of it, stowing the black sogginess that remained in one coat pocket. There would be time enough to slip up to her room to start over before she had to see the others. Running her hands back through her hair, she closed her eyes, one last time. When she opened them again, she knew they matched perfectly the cool set of her features.

“You cannot talk about this, with the others.”

Thor nodded, just once. “They would not understand.”

Though Wanda had so often spoken for the both of them, her words had always been measured, thoughtful, calculated. Thor’s mind was not open to her now, and she did not wish to press its odd barriers, but the sorrow etched into the noble features made her frown.

“So…it was not…appropriate, either, where you are from?”

Leaning back, long legs stretching before him, he gave a humourless chuckle. “As it so often is not,” he observed, bright eyes very wry where they sought out and met her own. “But then Loki often cared little for the approval of others.” Now he turned distant, eyes wandering away as if caught upon a changing wind. “At least, so he would say.”

Her own hands clenched again to fists, rings digging into flesh, nails into the silk of her fingerless gloves. _Pietro_. He had loved most to press his face into her hair, lips tattooing whispered words into her skin. _My strength is born of you. Sure, I always craved the wind and the speed and the world at my feet._ And though his hands might begin at her waist, so quick would five daring fingers slip low about her thigh. _But I only took it so I could give it to you._

Blinking against the sun, Wanda spoke very quiet. “You do not believe it now?”

With his head raised high, Thor stared into the sun as if he might never go blind. Or perhaps he always had been. “There was much I did not know of him,” he said, slow, and closed his eyes. “That, we do _not_ have in common.” When he glanced to her again, golden hair ablaze, his misery gleamed from his eyes like an unsheathed blade. “How I envy you that!”

She could not stop the cold edge of her chuckle. “Then you come only to tell me I am the lucky one?”

“I come only to tell you, you need not be alone.” Wide-eyed, she could not look away even as he smiled wanly. “I will return to Asgard. I will live without my brother, though as a child I had never even considered a life where it might be so.”

She licked dry lips. “And I shall stay here.”

“You might come with me.”

He could not have surprised her more had he simply picked her up and spirited her away to his home beyond the Earth. “What?”

“We speak of seiðr, amongst the Aesir.” Something dark flickered behind his eyes; it might have been an ugly thought, once. “It is a sorcery not unlike your own. It comes from the soul, the heart, the mind.” The uncertainty in his voice now did not suit his broad frame and golden aura at all. “If there is truly nothing for you here, let me show you a place where you might find something new.”

_All I wanted is what I had_.

“My place is here,” she said, very even, and without regret. “There are sins I must atone for.”

_Mine, as well as his_.

When he nodded, it seemed to her he had already known how she would answer. “The offer will stand, always,” he said, rising from his seat. “Do not fear what you felt. It made you strong, not weak.”

“I know that.”

His eyes flicked away, and then back. The sadness of his smile made her heart ache anew for the wound he had so recently ripped open again in them both. “I will not be so crass as to call you lucky,” he said, soft. “But you are wise.”

“No. I _was_ lucky.” She bothered with no smiles herself. “I had him. And he had me.”

“Perhaps the comfort, then, is mine.” Sudden, he leaned forward, took her hand, pressed a kiss to the gloved knuckles. “Good luck and good travels to you, Lady Maximoff.”

With her heart tangled in her throat, Wanda only nodded. Then she watched him go until he was. Crowned in sunlight, a golden halo around his bowed head, it seemed a long time before he disappeared.

Then she lowered her own. _Just a little faster!_ How often had he said that? _Just a little more, and everything you ever wanted will be ours!_

One hand twisted a ring too tight about the finger of her left hand. “I already had everything I wanted most. Idiot.”

Letting go of the hand-worked silver, Wanda tightened her hands upon the bench. The world would always seem too slow, without Pietro to turn it just a little quicker. Easing to her feet, keeping her eyes forward, she dusted off the long skirt and looked to the path ahead. He had been her brother. She had been his twin. From the beginning they had shared everything. Death was only a delay. With the faintest of smiles, she began to move. Nothing would keep them apart.

_I’m twelve minutes older than you. Aren’t you ever going to catch up?_

She walked a little faster.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first time I've written Wanda, and I apologise if I screwed her up or just read her wrong. I also played with what little I know of her comics background and what little solid information the movie gave us to construct the small details I used here. I hope it wasn't too off-base.
> 
> I also have the terrible feeling this could be the start of ~ADVENTURES!~ with Wanda and Thor, but I am not sure I have the talent or time to take this story any further. But I had to go this far: two very different people, mourning two very different brothers. But some things are the same. Some things are always the same.
> 
> Thank you for reading. <3


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